


Of Details, Uncatalogued

by captainparakeet



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Alternate Reality, Gen, Male-Female Friendship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-09
Updated: 2014-08-09
Packaged: 2018-02-12 10:55:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,054
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2107179
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/captainparakeet/pseuds/captainparakeet
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sally acquires a new phone, and gets more than she bargains for. Siri!lock.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Of Details, Uncatalogued

**Author's Note:**

> I don't own BBC Sherlock, or any of its characters.

_ I’m Sherlock. Ruler of the high seas. _

 

_ The best in the world? _

 

_ Naturally. _

 

_ I’m Mycroft. Mycroft Holmes. _

 

_ Hello, Mycroft. Who are you? _

 

_ I’m your brother. _

 

-

 

It was all Greg’s fault. 

 

After all, it was him, sitting next to her and her ruined, water-logged phone, his feet jittery from nicotine withdrawal, who first introduced her to Sherlock.

 

“So,” he said, “any luck with it?”

 

“Nope,” she said, still fighting the chattering of her teeth.“Deader than dead.”

 

The phone in question was one of her rare, recent splurges. She’d barely had two months to fiddle with it when some bloody idiot decided to tackle her into the Thames to avoid capture, only to remember that he couldn’t swim, the moment he hit the water. Which meant 1.) she had to play lifeguard in freezing water at the butt-end of a fairly exhausting day 2.) her phone suffered a brutal end, and  3.) she was currently sitting at the back of a parked ambulance, blowing jellied mucus out of her nose and waiting for the late-afternoon chill to take its polite leave. 

 

Greg had that look in his face, half-wincing, half-sympathetic, that was pretty much his standard expression for _we don’t get paid nearly enough for this crap._

 

“You can have my mine,” he said. “I just got a new one, Christmas gift from Eloise. But this still works okay.”

 

Actually, the phone looked pretty beat up, but he could probably sell it for half the price.

 

“I can’t just _sell_ it,” he said, reading her expression, as if she’d just asked him to eat a kangaroo for lunch. “It has… _sentimental_ _value_. I’d rather pass it to someone I trust. ”

 

“Right.” 

 

“It’ll be as good as new—well, mostly. You see, I’ve got this…app on my phone, and you won’t be able to get rid of it no matter what you do to it.”

 

“Are you sure it’s an app, not some virus?”

 

“What? No, definitely not a virus. Listen. He’s really useful—“

 

“He?”

 

“Yeah, he’s a he. Kind of like Siri, you know, that thing with the GPS and the smart-ass answers. He can help you with pretty much anything.” 

 

A Greg-patented pause. “Well, he’s also kind of eccentric.”

 

“Define eccentric. 24/7 push notifications? Sent you to Tesco when you asked him for directions to the bank? Misspelled your dictations?”

 

“Oh no, it’s nothing like that,” Greg replied a little too quickly and defensively, and something in his voice told Sally that he’d wanted nothing less than to let the app know he’d been talking shit about him behind his back. “He’s very sharp. Very smooth. Very efficient. Just…” 

 

“Just what?”

 

“Tell you what. Try it for a month, and if you last that long, you’re…well, try it first.” 

 

It wasn’t exactly the most reassuring advice, but refusing the offer seemed impolite, so she decided to give it a try until she could get a proper replacement phone. It shouldn’t be too inconvenient.

 

-

 

As soon as she reset Formerly Greg’s Phone and logged in to her iCloud account, the phone buzzed, the camera blinked, and a deep baritone bellowed over the speaker. 

 

“You’re not Greg. Who are you? Wait, don’t tell me. Police officer, street duty? Yes, definitely. Long hours, proficient with firearms. Tube rider, coffee addict, morning jogger. Younger brother, higher income? Finance—no, tech. And your aunts are pestering you to get married.”

 

“Wait. Okay, hang on. Who the hell are you again?”

 

“Sherlock Holmes, the world’s only virtual consulting detective and _personal assistant_.” The latter description, Sally noted, was said in such contempt, as if the job was beneath him but needed doing anyway because most human beings are useless at managing their lives. “Didn’t Giraud mention me at all?”

 

“Giraud?”

 

“Your boss, isn’t he?”

 

-

 

Two weeks later, she started to wonder if she’d pissed Greg off in some mysterious ways, and this was his twisted idea of payback.

 

The amount of time she wanted to drown her phone into a bowl of pea soup, or drop it from a high place, just to shut Sherlock up: seven times a day. On a good day.  

 

-

 

Sherlock is technically a PA.  PA, for Personal Assistant, and Pain in the Ass. More the latter than the former. Sure, he’s smart and incredibly efficient, but he’s also annoyingly invasive. Right after introducing himself, he deduced her personal stats, history, love life (of lack thereof), her irrational work hours, her family’s long lists of Potential Suitors, and her dysfunctional relationship with overpriced big-chain coffee. 

 

He sorted her contacts into neat categories, created a category called ‘Useless Homo Sapiens’ and blocked all the numbers in it, set up her schedules, replaced her dentist and GP with other (supposedly better) names also covered by her insurance plan and vetted every name in her family’s Potential Suitors list with alarmingly detailed findings, including some measurements she wished she could un-hear. Apparently disapproving the amount of take-out places on her phone bookmarks, he deleted all the numbers and replaced them with over 120 quick healthy dinner recipes in the time it took her to have a quick shower. 

He also took pleasures in deducing all sorts of embarrassing minutiae about other people, including her superiors. In front of the person. Out loud. It’s only after Sally threatened to stuff him into her smelliest socks and lock him up in the shoe cabinet that he started to cooperate. 

 

But occasionally, she’d let him lob a snark or two at the Daily Fail reporters who insisted on derailing her press conferences. Then she’d switch her phone off, flash her most winning smile and apologise for the accidental disruption.   

 

-

 

Sally had just endured a three-hour lecture from Superintendent ‘I wouldn’t say that women weren’t suitable for investigative work but the record speaks for itself’ Mallory when Sherlock muttered from her pocket.

 

“Sally, Sally.”

 

“What?”

 

“Do you know he plays Solitaire on his work computer?”

 

“Who?”

 

“Your Superintendent.”

 

The mental image made her smile. Not that she’d admit it. 

 

“Right. But so what?”

 

“I just forwarded his scores to the entire building.”

 

“The entire building?”

 

“‘The entire building.”

 

“Don’t do that.”

 

“Why?”

 

“It’s impolite to send spam emails.” 

 

-

 

Nothing says New Year’s eve like a burglary at an upscale jewelry store in Hatton Garden. The smell of Christmas hangover and family drama were still thick in the air when the case came in. Normally, Sally would’ve been happy to let Greg pull his weight and land this one at Gregson’s feet, but reading cheap tabloids cast aspersions on the shop assistant, who apparently “didn’t look local”, was enough motivation to slip on her winter coat and take the case. 

 

She just pulled up at the scene when her phone beeped with an incoming message alert:

 

_Hey, Sal. Are you doing ok btw? Been trying to call you, but I can't get through. Did you change your number? :(   - Philip Anderson_

 

She checked the Useless Homo Sapiens list (she really should have him change the label) and found Philip’s name in there. _Fuck._ What’s Philip done wrong, anyway? He was friendly (if a little insecure), just some timid newcomer trying to prove that he belongs. She felt bad hearing his stories about being bullied on the job. As someone who’s still trying to climb—and cling to—the slippery totem pole, she knew how shitty it was to be stuck on the bottom rung.

And, to be honest, he reminded her of Trevor, back when Trevor still relied on her big sister to beat up the neighbourhood bullies. She always felt a little guilty about leaving him behind during her college years, but she couldn’t coddle him forever. And it turned up okay, anyway, him being a successful programmer and set to marry his boyfriend (and conveniently forgetting to send her an invite, like the passive-aggressive little brother he is).

 

Still, Older Sibling Guilt is a hell of a drug. That, and the need to be needed. So sitting across from Philip at a pizzeria two blocks away from the office, as he babbled, bright-eyed, about how tough and quick-witted she must have been to be able to handle real criminals on real murder cases felt good. Telling him that forensics is a huge part of the puzzle and something that few people could do felt even better. And sure, she wasn’t deaf to the nasty rumours about her and Philip, but it wasn’t the first time she’d heard people talking smack about her behind her back. 

 

As if reading her thought, Sherlock sighed condescendingly. “Oh, Sally. He’s taking advantage of your sympathy to get into your pants.”

 

She spotted Greg barking at a small group of reporters, and quickly manoeuvred her way past the crowd of shoppers drawn by the sight of yellow tapes and patrol cars like sharks to the scent of blood. 

 

“Not everyone’s morally corrupt, Sherlock.”

 

“You forget the ‘like you’ part.”

 

“Because that wasn’t what I was saying. What I’m saying is, sometimes it feels good to be told you’re significant when people keep telling you that you’re not, you know?  You heard how Bradley went on and on about my solve rate being inflated, right? How Greg only promoted me because he liked to be seen as an enlightened lad? It sucks, because even if you know it isn’t true, if you keep hearing it, it gets to you.” 

 

She felt ridiculous explaining all this to Sherlock, but since she’d started, she might as well stick the landing. “And it’s a nice to have a friend who can snap you out of that rubbish mind space.”

 

“And that’s the exact narrative Philip’s selling you. Because he knows you’re vulnerable to these kind of sentimental gabs.”

 

“They’re not just sob stories, though. Ow.” Bloody slippery snow. “They’re real, Sherlock. You wouldn’t understand.” 

 

Greg stood at the entrance of the store, waving. She set her phone to silent and got to work. 

 

-

 

Twelve hours later, while munching her half-cold Hawaiian pizza, Sally studied the photos of the graffiti-painted pictograms they’d discovered at the scene and booted up her laptop to search for its point of origin. She was geared up for a long night, and so engrossed in her mission (and knee-deep in an unrelated Wikipedia page about mummification) that his voice almost made her jump in her seat. 

 

“Sally, Sally.” 

 

“What?” 

 

“Let me see those photos. I can do image search far more efficiently than _people_.” The last word was delivered so condescendingly, she felt like throwing the phone across the room and out of her second storey window. 

 

Instead, she arranged the photos on her kitchen table, snapped them one by one and loaded the images into her mobile gallery. 

 

Sherlock responded by promptly shutting down the phone. 

 

Sally wasn’t sure if she ought to feel offended, like she’s just been kicked out of someone’s office after doing their paperwork. She took a short nap in the sofa, and was awakened by her phone’s frantic vibration.

 

“You’re not not looking at an authentic pictogram,” Sherlock said. Images flashed rapidly on her screen—photos from crime scenes across different landscapes and cities, some marked classified; equations scrabbled on chalkboards; digitised accounts on history, mathematics, and cryptography; she preferred not to ask where and how they were obtained. “Millions of pictures and nothing matched. What are the odds?”

 

“Right,” Sally says. An idea came to her. “Sherlock, can you do me another favour?”

 

“Depends. Is it illegal?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Excellent. What is it?”

 

“Look into the financial records of one Bill Grunner. He’s the owner and manager of Rockwood Diamonds. Check for large or irregular withdrawals within the past six months. Also look at the company’s existing insurance plan.”

 

“You think the pictograms are a red-herring?”

 

“Because the pictograms look pseudo-oriental, the suspicion so far falls on his assistant. But given what you found, the secret code angle is likely bollocks. I like clever codes as much as the next mystery junkie, but 90% of crimes like these comes down to old-fart wisdoms. Follow the money.”

 

 

 

-

 

On her groggy walk to work the next morning, she heard Sherlock mutter, half-muffled, inside the front pocket of her coat. 

 

“You’re a decent detective, Sally. Better than the dimwits in your department.”

 

“Hmm,” she said, half-nodding. 

 

“Your common sense makes up for the lack of imagination and methodical thinking.”

 

“Was that supposed to be a compliment?”  

 

-

 

The thing about Sherlock, Sally thought, was his utter lack of sensitivity even when he meant well. Case in point: hacking Philip’s private email, copying parts of the conversation and forwarding it to Sally without any warning whatsoever.

 

And that was how Sally learnt she’d been used as an unpaid actor in another family’s soap opera. On the day where she was supposed to embody serene contentment and happiness, at her little brother’s wedding, she had to hunker in the ladies’ cubicle, trying not to raise her voice. 

 

“So let me get this right. His wife wants a divorce. He thinks she’s cheating and wants to get back at her, can’t find a woman who wants to be his pretend mistress, and decides to cast good ol’ Sally in the role. Is that why he’s doing nothing to squash all those nasty rumours?”

 

“Precisely.” Sherlock sounded disgustingly pleased. “So, can I re-block his number?”

 

Sally rolled her eyes, switched off her phone and made a mental note to give Philip a visit on Monday.  

 

 

 

 

The silence treatment lasted three days. 

 

“Help me find a pasta recipe with pumpkins.”

 

“Why pumpkins?”

 

“Peace offering from Aunt Loretta.”

 

“For trying to set you up with the hypochondriac ginger?”

 

“His name is Leonard.”

 

“But why pumpkins?”

 

“Shut up, Sherlock.”

 

 

-

 

 

Sally hadn’t thought much about Sherlock’s origins, but his loud protestations whenever she tried to google his name on the phone got her wondering. 

 

She found some disgruntled user reviews, some lawsuit threats, and official apologies from 221-B, the now-defunct company who developed the app. And Greg had no clue how, or why, Sherlock came to be on his phone. Six months ago, he woke up to find Sherlock already up and running, badgering him about nineteen key clues he’d missed on Violet Hunter’s case and suggesting that he hide in the laundry bin if he wanted to catch the suspect red-handed. 

 

So, not very informative.  Out of ideas, she called Trevor on her landline to ask if he knew about Sherlock, and the programmer who made him.

 

“Uh, rumours, mostly.” 

 

“What kind of rumours?”

 

“He’s supposedly some kind of a genius. What I heard was, he really wanted to have a little brother, so he designed one, and that was Sherlock the prototype. That was when he was twelve. And...I guess somewhere along the way, he grew out of it.” 

 

“What do you mean ‘grew out of it’?”

 

“I mean, a digital sibling is not a human sibling, you know? It’s like having an imaginary friend. He can’t play with it forever.”

 

-

 

Sherlock being Sherlock, he knew that she knew. 

 

“He was a rubbish big brother, anyway.”

 

Sally would’ve bought his casual dismissal if he didn’t sound a lot like Trevor the day she left for Massachusetts eight years ago, locking himself in his room and being annoyingly petulant and guilt-tripping. 

 

“Hmm,” Sally murmured. And if, after this exchange, she elected to spend most of her free nights thawing out cold cases that none of her colleagues wanted to touch, and debating Broadchurch theories by shouting into her phone speaker, she definitely wasn’t doing it out of sentimental reasons. 

-

 

One morning, the familiar key-shaped icon nestled between her Dropbox and iTunes buttons disappeared. Her folders and contacts (including the Useless Homo Sapiens folder) were still intact. But there was no obnoxious voice reciting the perils of messing up with human circadian rhythms rousing her awake at the crack of drawn, or Mahler selections accompanying her 3 a.m peeing sessions. Her phone didn’t automatically launch the calculator to show her accumulated monthly calories intake whenever she dared call for late-night takeouts, and it no longer pestered her to tell Greg that the Hugo Boss cologne wasn’t working for him. 

 

It was what it was supposed to be. A normal phone. 

 

-

 

And that’s a good thing, right? 

 

-

 

“It’s useless, Sal. Sherlock’s probably designed with a fixed lifespan from the beginning. Nothing much you can do about it, especially since 221-B folded.”

 

-

 

“Mr Holmes?”

 

Sally didn’t know who she was expecting to see. Other than a washed-out digital scan of the newspaper-printed photo of the 14-year-old boy who once stunned the world with his scholarship-winning computer science project, she hadn’t been able to find any recent picture of Sherlock’s ‘brother’. And he looked surprisingly…ordinary. 

 

“Yes?”

 

“My name is Sally Donovan. I’m—I’d like to discuss something with you.”

 

He gave her a long, appraising look. “You’re here for Sherlock.”

 

At the look of surprise on her face, the man flashed a rueful smile. “I did keep tabs on him.” A small part of her wanted to ask: _why didn’t you let him know_? 

 

-

 

The e-mail arrived at 2am, just as she was about to shut her laptop and head to bed. She didn’t recognise the sender’s name, but the company address caught her eye. 

 

_Dear Ms Donovan,_

 

_I am writing to you in behalf of Mr Mycroft Holmes, my employer. You’ll be glad to know that he’s taken your arguments to heart. Unfortunately, there is no viable way to recover the memory of the program that had been deleted for more than 2 weeks. That means Sherlock, when reconstructed and rebooted, will be what he was when he was first conceived: a twelve year-old—bright, precocious and highly intelligent indeed, but with far to learn compared to the Sherlock you met._

 

_If you still intend to take up Mr Holmes’ offer, we’ll be glad to hear from you._

 

_Sincerely,_

_A.E._

 

_-_

 

The phone flickered to life.

 

“I’m Sherlock,” the (much younger voice) introduced himself. “Ruler of the high seas.”

 

“Hello, Sherlock. This is Sally. Sally Donovan.” 

 

A pause. 

 

“It comes from _Sarah_ ; Hebrew for princess,” the voice said tentatively. 

 

“Indeed.” 

 

“Are you a princess?”

 

“Not really.”

 

“A pirate, then?” 

 

“Maybe. In another life.”

 

“Then who are you, Sally?”

 

She felt the corners of her mouth curling up. “An old friend.” 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> The title is taken from Li-Young Lee’s Mnemonic. 
> 
> This story was written for (and thanks to the encouragement of) Nina (sallydonovan on tumblr). We both adore Sally, Vinette Robinson's charismatic performance, and the possibilities, yet realised, that her character offers the show. While her canon relationship with Sherlock in the first two seasons are far from friendly, the hint of once-friendship gone sour offers abundant "what if?" scenarios that deserve some exploration. Theme-wise, I've always wanted to explore the connection between technology and what it means to be human. The idea of found family is also one of my favourite themes, especially since the show, for all its pretend dismissal of sentiment, is largely about a person coming to appreciate his found family. And of course, all credits to Spike Jonze's Her for the concept.
> 
> At the end of the day though, I just wanted to write something fun. If you've read this far, thank you so much, and I hope you enjoyed the ride.


End file.
